While the world watches in shock, the violence that we have all come to associate with America and our perverse relationship to guns, gaming, random murder and mayhem, at Clear Spring School we do Sloyd. In the 3rd and 4th grades we made stick shuttles for their woodshop made looms. In 1st and 2nd grades, we sanded stick shuttles, sanded parts for real working clocks they are making, and we began weaving on their looms.

In Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland, Sloyd is a part of the standard school curriculum, and is very much like the art classes we have in American schools. The students choose wood, textiles or metal sloyd, and it is taught in complete isolation from other subjects.

At Clear Spring, the wood shop serves as a point of curriculum integration. The children's weavings could easily be called textile sloyd, except that in Scandinavian countries, it would be unlikely that the children would have made their own looms. Our depth of study is very much in keeping with what Otto Salomon originally intended in the development of educational sloyd.